Moonlighting

Moonlighting is sort of frowned upon in the military, but
isn’t all that uncommon, especially among enlisted personnel. The officers make
a fair amount of money, but the enlisted pay scales don’t make for a cushy
lifestyle. Therefore, there are times when it becomes almost a necessity to do
a little work on the side, especially if you have a wife and family.

I had never moonlighted before, but when I was transferred
to Stockton, California in 1966, soon after I began work, I found that a couple
of shipmates on my watch section were moonlighting, installing and
troubleshooting burglar and fire alarms systems. They had been at it for
several months, and I knew absolutely nothing about it. However, they convinced
me that it was a good way to pick up some extra money, and as with all enlisted
people, I sure could use it.

During our regular watch schedule, we all did technical work
that involved communications, and therefore we had some electrical and
electronic training. My friends, Dan and Mel, introduced me to their part-time
employer, a fellow named Val, who was an ex-policeman from San Francisco, who owned a telephone answering service which was the backbone for the alarm company he also owned. He used the telephone answering service as a monitoring station for all the alarms, and his responsibility when they received an alarm from the premises
was to call both the police and a representative from the alarm company. The
rep from the alarm company would be responsible for meeting the police at the
premises and opening it up for them..

The job and Dan and Mel had been performing involved the
installation of these alarm systems, as well as periodically troubleshooting
systems that had either malfunctioned, or had been the subject of a burglary, and
therefore had to be checked out before they could be used again. I began
working with Dan and Mel on some installation jobs, and it involved mainly
wiring the premises, breaking the system into zones, and then wiring in the
various types of contacts that needed to be used. Then, when the system was
complete, hooking it up to a telephone line that had a direct connection back
to our offices, where it was hooked to an alarm box that would sound an audible
alarm, as well as to light a light that would require a manual reset. That was
it in a nutshell. He paid us fairly well for the level of effort that was
required, and we were all satisfied. In fact, I went from a situation where we
could just barely get by on my Navy pay, into a situation where I was making
enough money from my moonlighting, coupled with all my spare time taken up by
my moonlighting, that I was actually accumulating money because I had no time
to spend it!

I do remember one day showing up at work at the alarm
company, and finding that Dan and Mel had already left on a job, and I didn’t
have any work to do, so I was about to head back to my house, and Val stopped
me.

“Where are you going, Bob?”

“Back home, I guess. The other guys are already out on the
job.”

“I’ve got a special job for you. There is a fire alarm pull
box over at this van and storage outfit in Manteca that needs to have a new insert put
into it. Wanna go?”

“Val, I haven’t been checked out on the pull boxes, I’m not
familiar with them, and not sure how to replace the insert.”

“No problem, Bob. All you have to do is get the key to the
pull box from the secretary over there, open it up and replace the fiberboard
insert, and then lock it back up. Think you can handle that?”

“It sounds like it.”

“Good,” he said. “Take my truck and here’s the replacement
insert.”

So, I went out to the driveway, took the fancy red pickup
truck with all the toolboxes on it, and headed out forManteca, which was about twenty minutes away.

Now, here’s where the fun started. I parked the truck, and
went inside the office. I informed the secretary there that I was there to work
on the pull box, and she gave me the key. Very confidently I walked back there,
found the pull box and inserted the key and turned it. Then, I pulled the pull
lever and all hell broke loose! That alarm was loud!

First, I tried closing the lever and that had absolutely no
effect. I repeated this a couple of times, and it was obvious that I wasn’t
going to succeed this way. Next, I looked around and found the master control
box, thinking there was a switch in there that I could use to turn off the
alarm. I tried the same key, but it didn’t fit. So, all the while this alarm is
waking dead people in the next county, I went back to the office to see if they
had a key for that. Naturally, they didn’t. What to do….. What to do….

I asked if I could use the phone. (Remember, this was way
before cell phones.) I got on the phone and called the office. The conversation
went something like this.

“Hello”

“Val?”

“Yes, this is Val, who is this?”

“This is Bob. I’m over in Manteca on that fire alarm pull box job. We
have a problem.”

“What’s the problem?

“I did as you said, and opened the pull box and the alarm
went off. Never did get a chance to replace the insert. The alarm is still
sounding, and the fire department is on the way.”

“Well, just turn off the alarm.”

“I can’t. It’s inside the master control box, and I don’t
have a key.”

“I’ve got a key.”

“That’s not going to do us any good. You’re in Stockton.”

“I’ll bring it over.”

“You can’t. I have your truck.”

“I’ll drive your car over there.”

“You can’t. I have the key in my pocket.”

About that time, the fire department arrived and the first
thing they did was use their key to open the box and shut down the alarm.

I went back to the phone. “Val, the fire department just
arrived, and they’ve shut off the alarm, so no need to come over here. By the
way, they said to tell you there’s a $50 false alarm fine for this.

Well, Val wasn’t too happy about it, but I went ahead and
replaced the insert, and drove myself back toStockton.

That was the first and only experience I ever had with one
of those pull boxes. It was memorable though.

I remember another incident where we were installing a
burglar alarm system into a mall, and it wasn’t just individual stores, but the
whole mall. I was standing outside a jewelry store and I heard this crash. It
seems Dan was working above the suspended ceiling, running some wires from one
place to another, and his foot slipped. He came crashing down through the
suspended ceiling and landed on top of one of the jewelry counters. It didn’t
break the glass, but it sure scared the hell out of the clerk and the elderly
lady he was showing diamonds to. Took a lot of calming down to get past that.

In the same mall, once we had finished it, they had a grand
opening at noon the next day, and there were all kinds of people in there. They
were giving away prizes and balloons, and just generally having a good time.
That night, about 11:30 PM, we got an alarm from the mall, and I had to
respond. I picked up Dan on the way and we arrived and let the police in. They
couldn’t find any evidence of a break-in and we started looking for a cause for
the alarm. We didn’t find anything, so we chalked it up to a fluke and went
home. About an hour later, we had another alarm there, so away we went. Same
story. The police couldn’t find anything so we started looking again. Then we
found it. There was a balloon lying on the floor and we knew what had happened.
All those balloons from earlier in the day had been filled with helium and the
kids had let go of them and they floated to the ceiling. During the night, the
gas became inert, and they gradually started sinking to the floor. There were
motion detectors throughout the mall, and the sensitivity on them is
adjustable. Some were more sensitive than others, but at least a couple of them
detected the movement of them falling, ever so slowly, to the floor. That’s
what kicked off the alarms. We spend nearly an hour walking around that mall,
with rubber bands and paper clips, shooting down the remaining balloons. What a
way to spend a night!

Fire alarms are worse to work on than burglar alarms. They
have to have all the sensors mounted so high in the building to detect the
heat, which always tends to rise. In always involves walking around on the edge
of things, such as packing cartons, way up high in the air, and it’s scary,
especially if you have acrophobia, as I have. I didn’t even like getting into
the cherry picker basket, because it sways and always feels like it’s going to
fall over, despite the fact that it has outriggers to keep that from happening.

Troubleshooting an alarm system in a deserted factory or
warehouse in the middle of the night is scary too. You imagine that every noise
you hear is some fiendish murderer who’s out to get you, and we usually worked
alone. So, this was not my favorite thing to do.

I did get a peek at some of the attitudes that I never saw
in the Navy though. One day we were installing a fire alarm system into a van and
storage facility, and I had occasion to go into the office and wire up the
sensors in there. There was a guy sitting in there drinking coffee and shooting
the breeze with a couple of movers. One of them asked him if he’d like to come
along on a move, that they needed an extra guy. His response was, “Naw, I can
make more money from welfare just sitting here.”  It gives you a great feeling to hear
something like this.

I did this kind of work for about six or eight months, and I
would have continued, but a couple of my paychecks bounced. In and of itself
that might not have bothered me, but since I always deposited them into my own
checking account, that meant that my own checks were bouncing, and that was
absolutely a no-no. As a precaution, I used to get my paycheck from Val, and
immediately go to the bank and cash it. Anyway, after awhile that became too
much of a hassle, so Val and I parted ways.

I look back on this as a valuable experience, even though it
ended on sort of a sour note. Dan and I both got transferred later on, and Mel
got out of the Navy and went to work for Val full time. In my view, Val was
just another guy trying to make a go of it in tough circumstances, so I don’t
hold this against him. I do give him credit for assigning me to the only
stakeout that I was ever involved in. I sat in my car just down the street from
a guy’s house who was being sued for divorce, just looking to see if I could
catch him doing something he shouldn’t be doing. As a matter of fact, for the
entire eight hours, he never showed his face. Great detective I was!

All in all, it’s a shame that our servicemen have the need
to moonlight. My own experience was not that bad, but most I’ve known had it a
lot worse than I did.